Peter May - Chinese Whispers

It was out now. She’d said it all, and there was no taking it back. Before them, the old moat wound its way through the remodelled gardens to a tall, arched bridge in white marble beside a pavilion where water tumbled down over moulded rock. Beyond it, the Gate of Heavenly Peace rose in red-tiled tiers into the sky. It was sheltered here, and barely a ripple broke the surface reflection of the willow trees overhanging the water. People strolled along the paths on both sides of the moat, unhurried, drinking in the peace and quiet of this oasis of tranquillity in the very heart of the city.

Margaret and Li’s father walked in silence with the buggy, then, Li Jon fast asleep, head tipped to one side, oblivious of the tension between his mother and his grandfather. Margaret looked at her child. Round, chubby cheeks, rosy in the cold. Slanted eyes shut tight, lids fluttering slightly, rapid eye movement behind them reflecting some dream that she would never know and he would not remember. And it struck her with a sudden jolt, that her son shared her genes with those of his grandfather. These two adults, at loggerheads with each other, had come together over thousands of miles and millions of years in the living, breathing form of this tiny child. She felt immediate regret at the harshness of her words and turned towards Li’s father with an apology forming on her lips. But it never came, halted by the shock of seeing the tears that streaked the old man’s face.

‘I have never meant to cause him pain,’ he said, and he turned to meet Margaret’s eye. ‘He is my son. His mother’s child. I love him with all my heart.’

She was filled with confusion and consternation. ‘Then why …?’

He raised a hand to stop her question and took out a handkerchief to wipe his face. ‘There is not much of me in Li Yan,’ he said finally. ‘Not that I can find. But he is the image of his mother. I see her in everything about him, in everything he does. In his eyes and his smile, in his long-fingered hands. In his stubbornness and his determination.’ He paused to draw breath, and fresh tears rolled down his cheeks. ‘He thinks that somehow I blame him for her death.’ He shook his head. ‘I never did. But when he left, to come to Beijing, it was like losing her all over again. He was everything I had left of her, and he took that away from me.’ He blinked hard to stop the tears falling from beneath the tangle of white fuse wire that grew from his brows. He put a hand on the push arm of the buggy to steady himself, and she saw the brown spots of age spattered across the crepe-like skin on the back of it. He seemed shrunken, smaller somehow, drowned by his big brown duffle coat, and clothes that hung so loosely on his tiny frame that they only fitted where they touched.

‘Oh, my God,’ she whispered, realising for the first time that the pain he had inflicted on his son was only a reflection of the pain he felt himself. But only because he had never expressed it, at least not to Li Yan. Not in that way. ‘You have to tell him,’ she said. ‘You need to talk. Both of you.’

‘I have never spoken of these things to a living soul,’ he said. He looked at Margaret. ‘But, then, neither have I spilled tears in public.’ He drew breath. ‘The Tao teaches us that agitation within robs one of reflection and clarity of vision. In this state of mind it is impossible to act with presence of mind. So the right thing is to keep still until balance is regained.’ He waggled his head sadly. ‘I have never stopped to think beyond my own pain. Until now. Never stopped to reflect, and regain my balance.’ Something like a smile creased his face. ‘Harsh words sometimes carry hard truths, and make one stop to reflect.’

Margaret could not think of a single thing to say. She put a hand over his, and felt the cold in it. ‘You should be wearing your gloves,’ she said. But he only nodded. They had reached the bridge, and Margaret said, ‘Could you lift one end of the buggy? He always wakens when I have to bump him up the steps.’

‘Of course.’ He wiped his face again, and blew his nose, and stooped to lift the foot of the buggy. And together they carried the child that bound them across the steep arch of this ancient bridge to the other side of the moat.

‘You push him,’ she said, when they got to the other side. And as they walked in silence together towards the pond where golden carp swam around a copper fountain, she slipped her arm through his.

Pau Jü Hutong was a maze of ancient Beijing courtyard dwellings, narrow alleys with tin roofs and grey brick walls, tiny shops behind sliding windows, and ancient trees that sprouted gnarled branches to shade the tarmac. Old men on tricycles pedalled up and down its length, school kids in woolly hats carrying well-worn satchels made their way home from school in groups of two and three.

Wu drove carefully between the parked vehicles, past the towering white detention centre where Section Six interrogators grilled criminal suspects, and turned in at the entrance to the Beijing Forensic Science Institute. The guard, huddled over a stove in the gatehouse, recognised them through the window, and the steel gates concertinaed to let them in. There was a police mini-van and a black and white Jeep in the forecourt, and half a dozen other unmarked vehicles. Wu parked up and Li got out clutching the two video tapes from the EMS post office. They climbed the steps, past two dancing red lanterns, and plunged into the building.

The AutoCAD computer was in a darkened room on the second floor. Li had phoned ahead, and so they were expected. A lab assistant shook their hands and took the video tapes, assuring them that the process of digitisation would only take a matter of minutes. ‘We require just a few frames in order to be able to lift the stills,’ she said. They followed her into the adjoining media room where she put the first tape into a player and started running it through. ‘Anywhere about there,’ Li said, stabbing his finger at the screen. He wanted the biggest and clearest possible images of the killer. The assistant stopped the tape. Their man had just stepped out of the burned-out patch of sunlight on the floor of the EMS hall. She ran it back a short way, and then punched a button on another machine and set the tape playing again. She let it run for about thirty seconds, then ejected it and put in the second tape. They repeated the process, capturing the best images of the man in the baseball cap, before the assistant flicked switches on all of the machines and one of them spat out a shiny silver disc about twelve centimetres in diameter.

She waggled it at Li. ‘Digitised on to DVD. Do you have the measurements?’ Li nodded and she picked up an internal phone and told someone called Qin at the other end that they were ready for him.

Qin was a big man in every way, nearly as broad as he was tall. He had cropped black hair and thick eyebrows that fell away in steep curves on either side of his eyes. His gold-framed glasses somehow softened the threat of his physical presence. He had been instrumental in developing the AutoCAD software. As he slipped the DVD into the computer and began capturing matching still images from each camera using the time-codes, he explained, ‘Used to be that we needed to take measurements from every side of a crime scene to build an accurate 3-D image. Now we just need one to get the scale for the whole thing.’ He examined the pictures of the killer striding across the concourse with his long coat and his baseball cap and the box with the kidney under his arm. ‘What measurements did you take?’

Li said, ‘The length of the hall, the height of the counter, the width of the windows …’

Qin cut him off. ‘The width of a window will do.’ Li placed the piece of paper with the measurements on the computer table. Qin typed in the width of the window in centimetres. ‘Okay, now the computer will do the rest.’ He ran the mouse dextrously across its mat and the arrow on the screen dipped and dived. Menus dropped down, options were selected. The screen divided into two halves. The left half showed one of the stills of the killer caught in mid-stride. For the moment the other half was blank. Qin pulled down another menu, highlighted one of its options, and the blank half filled in with an outline 3-D graphic image of the EMS hall, with the kidney man at its centre. By manipulating the options, Qin was able to take them through a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree circle around him. At intervals he hit the print button, and the printer spewed out hard copies.